Jen Knox

Subscribe

Subscribe to Jen to support their work and read subscriber-only content.

$2.00

$5.00

$10.00

An Ohio-born writer, Jen Knox's writing has been featured in The Best Small Fictions 2017 (Braddock Avenue Books), The Adirondack Review, Chicago Tribune's Printers Row, Chicago Quarterly Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Fiction Southeast, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, MJI News, The Saturday Evening Post, The Santa Fe Writers Project Quarterly, NPR, and Sequestrum, among others. Jen's writing has been nominated for a Pushcart and multiple Best of the Net anthologies. She is a Writing Coach, educator, and the Academic Programs Manager at OSU's Leadership Initiative.
Jen earned her BA in English from Otterbein and her MFA from Bennington. She is the author of After the Gazebo (NYC, New York: Rain Mountain Press), and she recently completed a collection of short fabulist fiction, The Glass City, which won the 2016 Prize Americana (Hollywood Books International). An excerpt of The Glass City also earned finalist status in the 2016 Calvino Prize from The University of Louisville. Jen's work has earned finalist status in the Dundee International Book Competition and a semifinalist status in the Book Pipeline Competition. Find her here: www.jenknox.com

We count to three and pull hard to gain an inch of light. The ice around the door gives, and a clump of snow is released. The fresh air feels nice for a moment, before it begins to bite at our cheeks. Yesterday’s snow is now an undercoat, and the powdery top layer glistens.

"Am I dead?”
“You should be so lucky. All this craziness going on in your world.” As she spoke, a child who looked like Peter from The Snowy Day, the first book I remember reading, ran alongside us on the street in his red suit.

"Rattle walked the loop at sunrise and sunset. At dawn, he was quick-footed, ignoring joints that ached and scraped as though rusted. He pushed on, to the first big rock, shaking the bones and waking the tendons. The stiffness would ease after a quarter-mile."

Jeff will be my first arrest. I don’t dislike the guy, but it’ll be easy, make me look tough out of the gate. The first arrest is a big deal, and I happen to know that Jeff will break the law any given day he finds breath in his lungs.